climate finance

Five months after the UN Climate Leadership Summit, with its unprecedented call to action for putting a price on carbon, low oil prices have provoked governments to look again at whether they have prices right and to consider how to exploit a golden opportunity to reset signals within their economies for lower-carbon growth.

Business leaders in closed-door and public sessions in Davos last month talked of the inevitability of effective prices on carbon and the need for an orderly transition to lower-carbon growth. There was a sense that business, not normally reticent when pointing out how policy can negatively affect operations, needs to use its voice to urge smart, early policy action on carbon pricing. The bottom line was that this price signal will be essential, if insufficient on its own, to steer economies closer to a pathway that can keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius.

The voices were CEOs, from all sectors of the economy and all regions of the world. They recognize the risks climate change poses to their supply chains and businesses.

Last week, we heard those arguments again as organizations that have come together since the summit into a Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (CPLC) met to assess progress and plan for 2015.

By Jeff Swartz, Director of International Policy at the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA)

With carbon pricing policies emerging around the world and the recent show of public support for carbon pricing from 74 national governments and more than 1,000 businesses, one piece of the puzzle that needs to be solved is how to connect systems to create an international carbon pricing framework.

In the lead up to the Paris negotiations this December, governments from around the world – including China, South Africa and Russia – have signaled their willingness to apply a price on carbon, yet businesses and civil society know that we will not be able to move towards a fully functional low-carbon global economy by operating under a fragmented system of international carbon pricing policies. Furthermore, the IPCC’s verdict on the need to increase international cooperation on climate mitigation policies highlights the need for an international carbon pricing framework.

Barbara Buchner is senior director at the Climate Policy Initiative and lead author of the Global Landscape of Climate Finance reports.

In December 2015, countries will gather in Paris to finalize a new global agreement to tackle climate change. Decisions about how to unlock finance in support of developing countries’ low-carbon and climate-resilient development will be a central part of the talks, and understanding where the world stands in relation to these goals is a more urgent task than ever.

Climate Policy Initiative’s Global Landscape of Climate Finance 2014 offers a view of where and how climate finance is flowing, drawing together the most comprehensive information available about the scale, key actors, instruments, recipients, and uses of finance supporting climate change mitigation and adaptation outcomes.

This week in London, the Prince of Wales brought together representatives from government, the private sector, and civil society around the goal of protecting and restoring tropical forests. The gathering took stock of forest commitments made at the UN Secretary-General's Climate Summit last September and identified priority actions for 2015 – a critical year for advancing progress on the inseparable issues of development, poverty, and climate change.

With all eyes on a new climate agreement in Paris later this year, healthy forests and landscapes are seen as critical to cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero before 2100. The key underlying question is how to best achieve a true transformation in how we manage our forest landscapes, which are still degrading at a rapid rate.

Nigel Topping is the executive director of CDP, which works with companies to measure and disclose their environmental and climate impact and put that knowledge at the heart of decision making. He spoke at the World Bank Group about the power of transparency and carbon pricing.

In the corridors and sessions at the UN climate talks in Lima over the past two weeks, there has been extraordinary power and energy. We’ve seen material action as the financial sector starts to transform how it thinks about long-term risk. Coalitions are working together on tax reform, regulatory reform, and putting a price on carbon, and country after county is saying that they have been able to clean up their regulatory framework and put themselves in a position to grow.

By Nicolette Bartlett, Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group and CISL

Developing effective carbon pricing mechanisms can and will play a key part in tackling climate change, facilitating the much needed investment cost-effectively and at scale. Specifically, “cap and trade” policies or emissions trading schemes (ETS) have been widely adopted in recent years because of their potential to foster greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

One Brazilian business group that CLG has been partnering with is taking a novel approach. Empresas Pelo Clima (EPC) implemented an ETS Simulation using live corporate data to engage Brazilian companies in discussions around what a robust cap and trade market might entail and how it could be designed and implemented. The ETS Simulation is delivered in partnership between the Rio de Janeiro Green Stock Exchange (BVRio – Bolsa Verde do Rio de Janeiro) and EPC through the Center for Sustainability Studies of the Business Management School at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV-EASP).

A discussion on carbon pricing at COP20 brought together executives from Unilever, pension fund AP4, and the BVRio Environmental Exchange, and officials from California, South Korea, and the World Bank Group. Carlos Molina/World Bank

​We’re doing a lot of talking and listening here at COP 20 in Lima about climate finance – how hundreds of billions of dollars were invested globally last year to clean up the air, get efficient energy to more people, make agriculture more productive, and build resilience to extreme weather events.

We all know and acknowledge much more still needs to be done – the International Energy Agency and others believe we need at least $1 trillion dollars of new investment each year to address climate change.

There’s no way that public money alone can meet that goal. We need to find ways to catalyze the limited public funds we have to unlock private investment. That, of course, means investors need to have the confidence that the right policies are in place to make long-term investments for the climate.

The high-level segment of the UN climate talks is starting here in Lima. It's a different mood today than in previous climate talks and a different conversation, with both a sense of urgency and clarity of objective. There has been a lot of discussion around carbon pricing, in particular, with representatives from countries, cities, states and industry saying the question now is how quickly we can move.

Mats Andersson, CEO of Swedish pension fund AP4, spoke at the World Bank Group about the importance of transparency for investors and the impact of a carbon price in shifting investment to cleaner, more sustainable development.